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How-To Geek

Needing an all purpose text editor that has a tabbed interface and can be easily customized to suit your needs? Enjoy what a text editor ought to be with EditPad Lite.

Installation

If you choose the “Advanced Options Installation”, there are a total of five install windows that will allow you to fine-tune your installation of EditPad Lite. The first three are shown here (the last two are the classic “Agree to License” and “installation Complete” windows).

Notice that there is an option for a “No-Questions Asked Installation” and an option to create a Portable Version (a very nice option indeed!)

Notice that you can customize the install folder and Start Menu shortcuts setup at the same time here…

Select “Full Detail” at the bottom of this window to see what is included in the install categories shown here.

After you have finished the installation and started EditPad Lite, you will be asked if you would like to make it the default text editor on your system. Choose what suits your needs best.

The text highlighting can be turned off or set to a custom color of your choice. The interface is compact but easily accessible and even with the tab bar showing you do not lose a lot of screen real-estate.

Additional tabs are extremely easy to add and manage with “highlighting color” for the tabs with unsaved changes or those that have not been saved yet.

Notice the Lines: Character Count and Document Status in the lower left corner (more great features!).

And the Help Menu with quick access to the Keyboard Shortcuts associated with EditPad Lite.

Preferences

EditPad Lite has a delightful amount of customization options available for you to choose from. Here you can select a preset color configuration or create a custom color setup for your tabbed windows (broken down into specific categories).

Set up the cursor in a shape and style that best suits your needs with custom colorization. You can even test cursor configurations while you have this part of the preferences open to help you choose the one that you like best!

Set up date formatting, how multiple instances of EditPad Lite are handled, and some specific fine-tuning for searching.

Here you can specify how EditPad Lite will handle files.

Create new or delete current shortcuts with a simple click.

And specify System Tray behavior, effects on your registry, and browser access/opening.

Conclusion

EditPad Lite is a wonderful text editor to have installed on any computer. Lightweight, highly customizable, tabbed interface,…pure Text Editor goodness all in a single package!

Akemi Iwaya is a devoted Mozilla Firefox user who enjoys working with multiple browsers and occasionally dabbling with Linux. She also loves reading fantasy and sci-fi stories as well as playing "old school" role-playing games. You can visit her on Twitter and Google+.

Interesting little tool, wish I would have known about it when I was coding away in college. Don’t do as much coding now, but still could be useful.

One thing though, the download link you provide sends you to a page for the pro version or a demo of the pro version. A direct link to the Lite version is here http://www.editpadpro.com/editpadlite.html. It’s a bit confusing, for me at least.

I had been using the free version for many years, at least 10. Though I really didn’t need the Pro version, I decided to buy it just to support the developer. It does everything you need a text editor to do better than any other text editor that I have tried and continue to try. The pro version does offer syntax coloring and other aids for the programmer, though I do not use it for my programming work.

DID YOU KNOW?

When the United Kingdom declared war on Japan in 1941, Winston Churchill sent a letter to the Japanese government announcing such; when asked about the gesture later he explained, “Some people did not like this ceremonial style. But after all when you have to kill a man it costs nothing to be polite.”